CloudBees Doubles The Cloud Spin

By Adrian Bridgwater, September 27, 2013

Fast IT and "cloud-extended", two new labels for hybrid?

CloudBees is trying hard to cast a new virtual service delivery model with its "cloud-extended" enterprise strategy. The concept: Take a portion of public cloud to accelerate application development and delivery while continuing to make use of existing on-premise IT assets in a secure manner.

Surely this is just hybrid cloud computing renamed with a natty twist?

CloudBees has more buzzwords for us though — the firm says that enterprises increasingly recognize that the cloud lets them spin up and deliver new projects rapidly, work that many are referring to as "Fast IT" in motion.

"To meet today's fast-cycle business needs, companies need to unleash their 'Fast IT' — and they're getting this done by leveraging the public cloud," said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees. "At the same time, they don't want to scrap their existing 'Core IT' investments. Using the CloudBees platform, enterprises can develop an app in the cloud, test it, stage it, and run it, but they can still leverage all their existing IT investments."

Of more substance perhaps are details of the firm's VPN to Jenkins. This new capability allows users of the CloudBees-hosted Jenkins service to connect via VPN to on-premise development resources, such as source code repositories, test databases and other development artifacts. Fast IT projects can use cloud-based resources for development, testing, and staging while securely accessing existing, on-premise enterprise investments.

Also of more substance than spin, there is Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) support, where enterprises overwhelmingly use SAML-based identity and access management systems. To take advantage of cloud-based resources for Fast IT projects, they need to control access to their systems using their existing SAML investments. CloudBees now supports SAML 2.0 based authentication and authorization, which can be coupled with Role-based Access Control within the CloudBees hosted Jenkins service.

Finally, and again away from the marketing buzzwords, is WEAVE@cloud AppCentric Integration. This is CloudBees new data migration and synchronization service. WEAVE@cloud has been extended to simplify how RUN@cloud applications publish and subscribe to events from data and SaaS services.

Events from on-premise and hosted databases and services can trigger actions in applications hosted on RUN@cloud and vice-versa. CloudBees' recent acquisition of FoxWeave established CloudBees as the first PaaS vendor to offer services for SaaS application and data integration.

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